Tag Archives: housing

Since suburban-poverty.com takes a global view of its namesake issue it is a little surprising we have not mentioned H.U.D. Apparently the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development has had, shall we say, its ups and downs over the years. Either way they have made themselves felt and been a factor shaping urban and suburban life in America for some time now. In the winter of 2012 their Policy Development & Research people produced this item called Meeting the Challenges of Suburban Poverty.

One of suburban-poverty’s interns came to the office looking rather the worse for the wear today. Apparently they could not sleep because of a night terror. She was being driven across the suburbs by an octogenarian relative with very poor eyesight in a twenty-year-old old Nissan Pathfinder with a rusted out frame. The driver couldn’t remember where anything was, and began mashing the gas and brakes on his V-6 engined nag in equal parts frustration with himself and rage at the price of gas. Pothole after pothole battered our poor intern into a queasy terror as the Pathfinder caromed off rotting curbs, felled a rusty lamp post and mangled a disused mailbox before arriving at the half dead mall beside the tent city.

What are we all to do when this nightmare becames reality? Getting around is among the top one or two issues for suburbanites. How old age improves on that issue we don’t know. Readers may share our intern’s concern about the future of motorized suburban living. Indeed, right now, a threat to the ability to drive about at whim would undermine the entire quality of life of possibly tens of millions of North Americans. Particularly for the elderly, we worry about the future of car-dependent living arrangements.

On top of the weird economics of suburbia and the shortage of public transit out there in Toofartowalkland comes the aging of physical infrastructure interacting with the aging human bodily infrastructure of suburbia. …assume the crash position, people!

We aren’t saying that older, centralized urban hubs should be ossified on behalf of the poor. But these ideas to manipulate and reposition socio-economic groups are no better than deliberate neighbourhood busting via highway projects or gentrification, are they? Where’s the balance? Linked here is an item from the Guardian for just such a scheme that would see people incentivized from London to the much smaller community of Hull on the North Sea.

photo credit: MichaelMaggs via Wikimedia Commons

We used to think the future would be about flying space cars more than about people living in their cars …but that’s how it goes, apparently. If you find your own self unable to pay off student loans or cover rent and end up living in what used to be a symbol of middle class aspiration, the item linked below is for you. It’s a depressingly long wiki article with a dozen-and-a-half citations and over 40 contributors.

Gosh, but there’s a lot of little details to get down pat when it comes to living in a metal box! Our favourite tip is to never sleep in the driver’s seat of your castle. Apparently if you do your body and brain may closely associate that location with sleep and cause you to have a collision, …assuming you actually have somewhere to drive to.How to live in your car

Recent policy changes in and around London, England are seen by some to represent the system ‘taking the gloves off’, so to speak, in regard to who gets what and lives where. To some extent these policy changes probably just formally represent changes and desires that have been on the books and in the hearts of decision makers for some time. If you are on the receiving end it may mot much matter from whence it all comes, this latest effort at reordering the UK’s capital, long the seat of extreme differences in income and standard of living. These items linked below would appear to describe a bold-faced, formal, legalistic and economic effort to move the lower orders away from central/high prestige areas.

When Arianna Huffington sold her news aggregation site to Yahoo! we were concerned about what looked like another sell out of a smaller, interesting, independent entity to a mass media conglomerate. The jury is still out on that one but we think we all agree that socially conscious reportage certainly doesn’t hurt anybody’s image. Mind the Gap is a new ongoing feature on HuffPost’s Canada page. Among other poverty-enhancing things, it turns out that the increase in income inequality has jacked up the cost of housing for all income groups.